Charlottesville Breaking News

For the second time in three months, a
refrigerated truck has spilled its milk near Afton. Today's wreck
occurred around 8am when the tanker overturned at the intersection
of Critzer's Shop Road (Rt. 151) and Rt. 250. Steve Elliott,
Albemarle County Fire and Rescue Battalion Chief, said the
truck's driver was able to safely extricate himself from the
vehicle. However, city and county officials remained at the scene
in order to deal with the milk spill, which poses an environmental
hazard, he added. Elliot said that the truck dumped around 3,000
gallons of milk directly into Stockton Creek, a Rivanna River
tributary which runs under Critzer's Shop Road at that
intersection. With help from biologists at the state Department of Environmental
Quality, Elliott learned just this morning that milk can become
hazardous when it leaks into a water source, because multiplying
bacteria use up oxygen in the water. Consequently, "Even a few
hundred gallons of milk will kill living things in the water," he
says, adding that he expects a substantial fish die-off as a result
of this spill. "We take environmental stuff pretty seriously
because of what we have aro...

Over a year after the Hook
first extensively reported it, somebody at CBS decided
the story of William Beebe, Liz Seccuro, and justice delayed 21
years would make a good TV show. At least that seemed to be the
case when a recent episode of the CBS crime drama Close to
Home hit the air. The opening sequence of the March 30
episode, entitled
"Making Amends," features characters Ellen Pinter and Tim
O'Neill exchanging e-mails about an event that Pinter writes "more
than just hurt me that night." After a face-to-face meeting that
goes awry, Pinter tells a prosecutor that

as part of his 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous program, O'Neill has
sent her a letter of apology for raping her at a fraternity party
11 years before, but that O'Neill danced around the word "rape."
Eventually Marion County, Indiana prosecutors charge O'Neill with
drugging and raping Pinter, at which point O'Neill cuts a plea deal
to implicate fraternity brothers who also took part in the
incide...

It was just before dawn on Friday, November 17, and
Thurman Hensley's life was about to change. Making his way over the
rocky terrain and thick patches of mountain laurel of his 250-acre
property bordering the Shenandoah National Park, the seasoned
hunter and expert marksman tracked his prey.

Then, at 8:30am, with the sun shining brightly on the
cool fall day, Hensley finally spotted his mark. He raised his
muzzle loader, took aim, and fired the gun's single round. Through
the cloud of smoke, the 60-year-old saw the animal lurch as his
bullet penetrated its torso behind the shoulder.

It could have been a fatal shot. But rather than
fall, the massive creature lumbered off into the woods with Hensley
close behind, determined to snare a prize kill and put the wounded
animal out of its misery. An hour later, however, Hensley, now
unarmed, found himself fighting for his own life, locked in a
bloody battle to the death with Virginia's largest mammal.

At the Board of Architectural Review's
February 20 meeting, final plans were approved for renovations to
McGuffey Park. "That's an interesting project," says BAR vice-chair
Syd Knight. "It's going to be a park unlike anything
Charlottesville has seen." Indeed,
as reported by the Hook in November 2005, the park
will be a kind of "living sculpture," replete with design
"footprints" of a Victorian mansion and kiddie equipment named "the
Kuma," "the Argo," and "the Spica." Designed by
free speech wall architects Pete O'Shea and Robert
Winstead[error–sorry], the park project has a determined
group of North
Downtown residents, called Friends of McGuffey Park, who are
continuing to raise money for their vision, which could cost as
much as $750,000. Of course, not everyone was...

The controversy over Wintergreen Resort's decision to partner with a big Charlottesville-based real estate firm has erupted into a federal lawsuit, according to a story in this morning's Daily Progress. Mountain Area Realty, which purportedly holds a 30 percent share of the market for properties at the Nelson County mountain playground, is claiming in the suit that the new partnership between Wintergreen and Roy Wheeler Realty Co. could monopolize the market. The issue first came to light in September with a Hook story by Courteney Stuart. #